| Crimson Rosella Platycercus elegans |
||||
 |
Australia
The Crimson Rosella is distributed in Australia in the east and south-east but excluding Tasmania. It is found in forests and woodlands as well as scrublands and gardens. |
|||
 |
It feeds mainly on seeds but also eats blossoms and fruits of trees and bushes as well as orchard fruits.
There is a wide variety of plumages and I will deal with one main sub-species, Yellow Rosella P. e. flaveolus on a separate page. Here you can see an adult P. e. elegans in photo 1, an immature of this sub-species in photo 4 and a sub-adult still showing a bit of green in photo 3. |
|||
 |
Photo 2, taken on Kangaroo Island, South Australia, shows an adult of the race P.e. melanoptera which is a darker red with narrower red edgings so generally has more black on the back. I must admit that I think the difference is quite a subtle one. The difference is more pronounced when compared with the race P. e. nigrescens of north-east Queensland, seen in photos 5 and 6, which is darker as well as smaller that the other races. | |||
 |
The first bird that I encountered was this immature bird on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria. I couldn't work out what it was - another species new to science perhaps - until I got back to my field guide and discovered that it was a Crimson Rosella. It's just so very different from the adult. | |||
 |
||||
 |
||||
 |
Photos 7 and 8 were taken at Mount Lofty near Adelaide, South Australia. Some authorities treat this as a separate species, Adelaide Rosella P. adelaidae while others treat it as a sub-species of Crimson Rosella P. elegans adelaidae while still others treat it as an intergrade between P. elegans subadelaidae and P. e. fleurieuensis. | |||
 |
||||
|
| If you do not see a menu on the left, you may have arrived at this page from another site. Please click Home to get to my main page. |